Terry O'Quinn

After six attention-grabbing seasons on the network airwaves, Lost has turned out to be more than the sum of its parts.

Lost: The Complete Sixth Season

(2010)

802 min.
ABC.
Cast: Matthew Fox, Terry O'Quinn.

After six attention-grabbing seasons on the network airwaves, Lost has turned out to be more than the sum of its parts. Those parts have included intense character-based drama, a series-spanning "mythology" mystery, and genre theatrics of the action and science-fiction varieties. With the sixth season, co-creators/executive producers Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof faced the heavy burden of wrapping up the series in an artistically satisfying way that would, they hoped, also satisfy a majority of viewers. That task was made easier by the decision, years earlier, to set the series' end date in stone, allowing the writers to lay the proper amount of track to their final destination.

Even given that head start, Cuse and Lindelof haven't completely succeeded in providing a shapely narrative. The mystery has proved to be somewhat ungainly, and fans have groused about loose ends. But no one can argue that Lost stayed true to its character and its creators' intentions right to the end. Evolving from previous seasons defined by flashbacks and "flash-forwards," the sixth season broke the mold with a conceit dubbed "flash-sideways." The fifth season built to a climax involving an atomic bomb blast intended to "press the reset button" and cause Oceanic Flight 815 never to have crash-landed on a tropical island. In a stroke of storytelling genius, the season begins by suggesting Cuse and Lindelof didn't have to decide if the plan worked or not. In what mainfested as another J.J. Abrams-related alternate-universe tactic (see Star Trek and Fringe), both outcomes appeared to be true. The plane never crashed in one storyline we're allowed to follow, while the castaways deal with the fallout of a non-detonating dud in a simultaneous storyline. Which is reality? Might they both be reality? Ultimately, Cuse and Lindelof would suggest reasonably definitive answers to these and other questions about the nature of existence in Lost, while leaving enough ambiguity for multiple interpretations of meaning.

The long-anticipated showdown between man-of-science Jack Shepard (Matthew Fox) and man-of-faith John Locke (Terry O'Quinn) took an unexpected turn when Locke was murdered in Season Five. But O'Quinn remains a major presence in Season Six in a dual role: as the Locke who never crash-landed on the island and as the Man in Black, who has taken John's physical form to advance an endgame of escaping the island. The clash of good versus evil shares time with Jack's internal struggle to accept his destiny, putting rationality on the back burner and preparing for a leap of faith. The writing staff continues to serve the sprawling cast of characters: bad-girl-gone-good Kate Austen (Evangeline Lilly), bad-guy-gone-good James "Sawyer" Ford (Josh Holloway), loveable lug Hugo "Hurley" Reyes (Jorge Garcia), tormented Sayid Jarrah (Naveen Andrews), sarcastic medium Miles Straume (Ken Leung), separated spouses Jin-Soo Kwon (Daniel Dae Kim) and Sun Kwon (Yunjin Kim), crafty Ben Linus (Michael Emerson), traveler-in-time-and-space Desmond Hume (Henry Ian Cusick), crazed single mother Claire Littleton (Emilie de Ravin), pilot Frank Lapidus (Jeff Fahey), ageless Richard Alpert (Nestor Carbonell), and mysterious Flight 316 survivor Ilana Verdansky (Zuleikha Robinson). The stakes are high as the heroes attempt to prevent a Pandora's Box from opening, and more than one character pays the ultimate price.

Part of the fun of Season Six is the way it incorporates faces from the past, and certainly there is time for humor and action as well as nostalgia. But the soul of the show is its poignancy in tracing how characters process their regret over bad choices and missed opportunities by seizing on the new ones in front of them: second chances for redemption. The show is spiritual at heart, more interested in existential mystery than the ins and outs of the Dharma Project and the Machiavellian machinations of wealthy industrialist Charles Widmore (Alan Dale). Cuse and Lindelof expertly used multiple forms of media to moderate the expectations of fans and prepare them to cope with the death(s) of the series. And now that Lost is laid to rest, and we're writing the obituaries, what does it matter what we say about a series? Perhaps the best epitaph would be that of Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose grave quotes another famous metaphysical shipwreck story, Shakespeare's The Tempest: "Nothing of him that doth fade/But doth suffer a sea-change/Into something rich and strange."

Disney does it again with Lost: The Complete Sixth Season on Blu-ray. The five-disc set features stunning A/V quality, with hi-def transfers that are razor-sharp, with rich color and generally deep blacks. True to its source, the image can be grainy (and loses some sharpness in low light), but the series' typically bright, naturally-lit settings lend themselves to potent hi-def imagery. The sound, in top-of-the-line, lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1, matches the picture. There's simply no complaining about these mixes, which are unusually meticulous and potent for a TV show; ambience is terrific and the action roars (especially Ol' Smokey).

Disc One kicks off with an audio commentary for "LA X" by executive producers and co-creators Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse. These guys provide wall-to-wall excellence, in a good-natured conversation that covers their thinking heading into the sixth season and establishing devices in the premiere that would lead to the finale. Disc One also includes "Lost in 8:15 - A Crash Course" (8:26, HD), a recap montage of the series to date. For the record, the infamously snarky narrator (who gave the same treatment to Battlestar Galactica in the very similar "What the Frak Is Going On With Battlestar Galactica?") is Mary O'Brien, senior writer/producer at Met|Hodder in Minneapolis.

Disc Two includes an audio commentary for "Dr. Linus" by executive producers and writers Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz, and actor Michael Emerson.

Disc Four includes audio commentary for "Across the Sea" by executive producers and co-creator/executive producer Damon Lindelof and executive producer Carlton Cuse.

The rest of the bonus features reside on Disc Five. Most fans will be heading straight here for "The New Man in Charge" (11:56, HD), an original short film that provides a coda to the series. It starts out winningly tongue-in-cheek, then ends on a poignant note. I'm guessing most die-hard Lost fans will love this extra, which prominenetly features Emerson, Garcia and an actor best left unnamed.